Oh The Joy!

**Wrote this last night and then my site crashed so it didn’t get published.**

I love each of our kiddos.  I love our foster daughter.  I love all 5 of them something fierce.  They each are so different and carry such different personalities and stories.  They each were created so uniquely by God.  No mistakes in the making, just a reflection of His perfect image.

Today is Amon’s Gotcha Day!  Three years ago today they placed him back in my arms and my friend Ashley and I took the wildest, most stress filled plane ride of our lives…sweet baby Amon, his little heart in need of repair, and one oxygen machine in tow.  It was only a short 9 months after Mom died.  If you know anything about grief you know death changes time turning days into seconds, weeks into minutes and months into mere days.  It’s the darndest thing.  Time eventually goes back to normal, but not for a while.

When Amon came home it was like God throwing our family a life preserver.  He used this sweet boy to help heal our hearts.  Amon didn’t do the healing, but God most definitely used him in all his tiny babyness.  He brought light and joy and hope.  Sweet Harper needed healing and God used Amon to do the trick.  We all we’re about drowning…especially me…trying to tread water just as quick as I could, but those waves taking me under time and time again.  I’ve never experienced such deep sadness and such immense joy like the day I landed in Nashville with Amon strapped to my chest.  We made it, but how different one person missing changes the feelings and skews the view.  No one could ever have prepared me for the wild ride God had been taking us on and the next ride which was about to begin.

Doctors appointments and hospital visits began immediately.  Amon’s heart needed to be fixed.  He had open heart surgery just a little over a month after arriving home and we spent almost the entire next month in the hospital.  Then it was quarantine time for months to make sure he didn’t get sick while still healing.  A line up of meds.  Shots everyday.  The worry and sadness, but then oh the joy.  The joy.  That’s what God does.  He gave us our joy back even when I for one thought it was completely gone.  It was all the wildest thing to me.  It was a testament true and true of God’s promise that no matter where we find ourselves He will not leave us there.  I look back and cannot believe what a different person I am now.  Only Jesus does that.  Only God heals the absolutely brokenhearted…the run down…the one who feels surely there is not an ounce of hope left.  And then joy arrives on the scene and just like that the tide begins to turn.

Today I know God has healed my heart.  Do I miss my Mom…absolutely freakin’ yes, but I can confidently and surely say God has done a great healing in me only He could do.  Today Amon is thriving.  God has also done a great healing in Amon only He could do.

We kicked off his Gotcha Day with donuts and a cardiologist check up.  If you have a CHD kid then you know these appointments carry some weight…bring out the nerves…make you cry over donuts…maybe that one is just me 🙂  He was a champ.  He was amazing and his joyful, wild little self.  Aside from a few small things to watch, he got a good report and we’ll take that any day.  I spent the rest of the day tearing up at pretty much anything.  I literally could not get out the words to tell Josh how Harper prayed for Amon in the car on the way to school that morning…me in 5 Guys getting all kinds of vrklempt trying to hold back a flood with a giant hamburger and a paper napkin.  I told Josh “I’m just going to have to write it down for you.”  I was ridiculous.  And I really wish I could have been inside the mind of the teacher this morning who saw me pulling through the car rider line sobbing like the hot mess which I am.  I’m a lost cause.

Like I told the kids…most of my tears today were joyful tears.  Tears of gratitude.  Tears of thankfulness.  Tears because I’m just humbled to be His.  Healing for our family, myself and Amon didn’t happen over night.  There were very dark, hard days.  There were unknowns.  There was fear and anger and bitterness.  There were a lot of things I had to hand over…feelings I had to surrender to Him…thoughts which had to be taken captive.  There were those moments of utter loneliness…feeling as if God had surely forgotten about us.  And sometimes Satan tries to sneak all those feelings back in…take those foot holds… and we fight back the best we can…and we ask God to be everything we cannot be on our own.  And He is so mighty.  He is so good.  He did not leave us where we were and He fought on our behalf…and not only fought, but won.  He restores, redeems and renews.  He is faithful.  To Him be all the glory.

Happy Gotcha Day sweet, sweet Amon!